Drawing the Line

Both Van Court and Nicholson’s pieces seem to articulate a perspective which seeks to challenge the popular scholarly treatment of Jews in medieval literature. Both pieces of criticism share the goal of seeking to move past an unsatisfactory, reductive understanding of the portrayal of Jews in medieval literature. Van Court asserts that, “The social pathology of anti- Judaism, inflected as it is with social, cultural, economic, and theological concerns, is complexly pluralistic, and amidst the multilayered anti-Judaisms of medieval narratives we can tease out nuanced exceptions to univocality” (294). This thesis is decidedly a response to the pervasive viewpoint that the Jews simply constitute a moral and physical punching bag on which the normative power of Christian values asserts its superiority. It does seem implausible for the Jews to occupy such a one-dimensional role in the text, however looking at other war-centric narratives in medieval literature such as The Song of Roland, it is clear that the absolute one-sided rejection of a cultural “other” was an accepted narrative technique. Van Court concerns her treatment of the Jews in The Siege of Jerusalem with constructing historical evidence of the “confusion regarding the place of the Jews and Judaism in a well-ordered Christendom” (298).  She argues that instead of simply reducing the Jews to a one-dimensional caricature; Christian attitudes were conflicted between upholding the Jew as a traditional receptacle of ancient Christian virtue and reducing them to the sub-human level observable in The Siege of Jerusalem. Nicholson similarly laments how the tale is “ruined by rank anti-semitism” from a literary point of view (446). He is more concerned with, “the symbolic valency of the Jew” which implies that the text revolves around “political acts of exclusion as much as religious rationalization” (450). Both writers arrive at conclusions which are defined by their consideration of liminality. In The Seige of Jerusalem, Christendom is defining its cultural boarders in violent, decisive fashion after years of ambivalent treatment of the Jews. There is certainly textual evidence to support this reading, but do you agree? Do you see the drawing of a new cultural border in The Seige of Jerusalem or is a staunchly entrenched one merely being reinforced?